Word: wheats
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...militant farmers warn they will launch a nationwide strike on Dec. 14 unless Government price supports are raised substantially. They are threatening to stop selling their crops and stop buying supplies and equipment. Says Bud Bitner, a Colorado farmer who helped organize the protest, which is concentrated in such wheat-belt states as Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma and the Dakotas: "We're not trying to shut off the food supply of the nation. We're trying to get a reasonable price...
...From 1974 through 1976, the farmer saw prices rise higher and higher as he found markets-at home or abroad-for just about everything he grew. But with worldwide bumper crops this year, the U.S. farmer has watched prices plummet to a five-year low: down 7% from 1976. Wheat, which sold for $2.92 per bu. last year, is bringing $2.55 in Kansas City. Corn has dropped from $2.75 per bu. to $1.80 in Chicago, soybeans from a high of $10.45 last spring...
...times are particularly hard on the small farmer. Caught in a credit squeeze, he is usually the first to go bankrupt or give up (see box). Since 1970, farm debt has doubled to $101 billion. An Agriculture Department survey of the wheat belt last summer showed that 73,000 farmers were having trouble repaying loans, with some 14,000 of them likely to lose their farms. Edward H. Melroe, a Colorado grain farmer, reports: "I went to the bank last week for another $10,000 loan, and the banker told me: 'That's it. No more...
Facing such prospects and resentful of the seeming indifference of the rest of the country, farmers are understandably in the mood to beat their plowshares into swords. Talk of a farm strike began last July as grain elevators filled to capacity; excess wheat spilled into the main streets of rural towns and prices began to slide seriously. Disgruntled farmers staged impromptu demonstrations. In Clarkfield, Minn., a tractor caravan of 500 farmers spearheaded a protest. Jon Wefald, a former Minnesota agriculture commissioner, urged the protesters: "Do like the sheiks did with the oil. One day they sat down and said...
...give a hoot about them. They demanded that the Federal Government boost price supports to 100% parity, a figure based on the prices that farmers received in the relatively prosperous period from 1910 to 1914. Calculated in today's terms, such price supports would boost wheat to a whopping $5 per bu., a figure that would outrage consumers and spur inflation...